Monthly Archives: February 2013

The Obama White House has made a strong statement on the issue of free access to taxpayer-funded scientific research.

In a policy memorandum released on February 22, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally-funded scientific research.

The OSTP has been looking into this issue for some time, soliciting broad public input on multiple occasions and convening an interagency working group to develop a policy. The final policy reflects substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public.

Over 65 thousand citizens signed a We the People petition asking for expanded public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research.

Last week’s response to the public petition reads, in part:

The logic behind enhanced public access is plain. We know that scientific research supported by the Federal Government spurs scientific breakthroughs and economic advances when research results are made available to innovators. Policies that mobilize these intellectual assets for re-use through broader access can accelerate scientific breakthroughs, increase innovation, and promote economic growth. That’s why the Obama Administration is committed to ensuring that the results of federally-funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community.

Moreover, this research was funded by taxpayer dollars. Americans should have easy access to the results of research they help support.

The petition, OSTP response, and the memorandum to federal agencies are available on the White House website.

Winners of the spring 2013 Student Art in the Library juried exhibition have been announced. The UT Libraries has been holding Student Art in the Library contests since 2005.

The contest is open to UT students in all disciplines, and is judged by a committee of library staff. This semester the committee received 97 entries from 47 artists. First-place, second-place, and third-place winners are awarded cash prizes.

The winners are:

First Place: Melissa Dooley for “Nashville Skyline” (acrylic paint on corrugated cardboard); Second Place: Rachel Byrd for “Headdress” (oil on canvas); Third Place: Shannon Herron for an untitled triptych of underwater photographs

Artworks will remain on display in 135 Hodges Library through spring semester. This year the competition included so many excellent entries that the committee expanded the exhibit space to include a separate display of photography just inside the west entrance to the reference room. In addition, one of the artworks was selected for display at the Music Library. “Space of Music” (a work in paint and spray paint on canvas) by Chelsea Cole, is now on display at the Music Library in the Humanities Building.

T Cooper will read at UT’s Writers in the Library, Monday, March 11th at 7 p.m. in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

T Cooper is the author of three novels, including The Beaufort Diaries and Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes. His most recent book is Real Man Adventures, a chronicle of the writer’s transsexual journey presented through a collage of letters, essays, interviews, artwork, and conversations exploring what it means to be a man. T Cooper maintains a sense of humor as he takes us through his transition into identifying as male — even publishing the letter he wrote to his parents to inform them that he “wasn’t their daughter anymore.” It’s a brash, wildly inventive, and comic exploration of the paradoxes and pleasures of masculinity.

Cooper is also the editor of an anthology of original stories entitled A Fictional History of the United States (with Huge Chunks Missing). T’s work has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Believer, One Story, Electric Literature, and others.

T has adapted and produced a short film based on his graphic novel The Beaufort Diaries. The animated short, directed by the book’s illustrator Alex Petrowsky and starring actor David Duchovny, was an official selection at several film festivals, including Tribeca Film Festival, South By Southwest, the New Orleans Film Fest, the Worldwide Short Film Festival, and the Anchorage International Film Festival.

T Cooper was born and raised in Los Angeles, attended Middlebury College in Vermont, and taught high school in New Orleans before settling in New York City in 1996. He earned an MFA from Columbia University. T enjoys vintage airplanes, M*A*S*H, the great outdoors, world peace, and anything to do with pit bull advocacy. He lives with his family in New York and in the South.

The author will also hold a Q&A session for all interested students, 2-3 p.m., Monday, March 11, in 1210 McClung Tower.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@nullutk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@nullutk.edu).

Zotero now works with Internet Explorer, iPads, and other mobile browsers. Use the Zotero Bookmarklet to save sources directly to your Zotero library online. You must have a (free) Zotero account, but no other software installation is needed.

Zotero users now also have access to 300MB of free storage (for PDF’s and other attachments, upgraded from 100MB). More details here.

What is Zotero?

Like Endnote, Zotero is a bibliographic management tool. It works within your browser (or as a stand-alone client) to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Learn more here.

Valerie Laken will read at UT’s Writers in the Library, Monday, February 25th at 7 p.m. in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

Valerie Laken is the author of the short story collection Separate Kingdoms (Harper, 2011), and the novel Dream House (Harper, 2009). She holds degrees in English and Russian from the University of Iowa and in Creative Writing and Slavic Literature from the University of Michigan. Originally from Rockford, Illinois, Valerie Laken has traveled throughout the world. She has worked and studied in Moscow, Prague, Krakow, Madison, and now teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Creative Writing program.

Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Writer, and The Chicago Tribune. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, an Anne Powers Prize, two Hopwood Awards, a Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, and an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories.

Her short story collection Separate Kingdoms has been met with wide acclaim. The Chicago Tribune praises its “fine craftsmanship and powerful insight” and Library Journal calls it “vivid and evocative.” Likewise, her novel Dream House has been widely praised. The Kirkus Review says Laken “handles the fraught subjects of class, race, and family bonds with equal candor and sensitivity” and author Charles Baxter calls Dream House “sexy, sharp-eyed, and deeply haunted all at once.”

The author will also hold a Q&A session for all interested students, 3-4 p.m., Monday, February 25, in 1210 McClung Tower.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@nullutk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@nullutk.edu).

The University of Tennessee Libraries, in collaboration with more than 50 other academic libraries and the Educopia Institute, has joined a two-year project (2013-2014) to create the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC). As one of the founding institutions, the UT Libraries will play an integral role in the design and implementation of the LPC.

Academic libraries and the researchers and organizations they support are facing a new paradigm in scholarly publishing. The web, information and social media technologies, and the Open Source and Open Access movements are changing the framework in which scholarship is created, collected, organized, and disseminated. Yet, as shown by the highly regarded, Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded Strategies for Success project (http://wp.sparc.arl.org/lps/), library-based publishing groups lack a central space where they can meet, work together, share information, and confront common issues.

Through seed support from Educopia and participating institutions, the LPC project will engage practitioners to design a collaborative network that intentionally addresses and supports an evolving, distributed, and diverse range of library production and publishing practices.

During the first stage of the project, the LPC’s project team will document and evaluate how best to structure this initiative in order to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing for this field. The project team will produce several concrete deliverables, including:

• Targeted research, building on existing broader surveys, that will focus on topics of particular interest to the community, including costs, staffing, and how libraries are financing these ventures.

• A forum for networking and sharing communications about library publishing services, including an annual event and ongoing virtual training and community-building activities.

• The design and implementation of the Library Publishing Coalition as an ongoing, institutionally owned organization that serves the needs of this community.

Steven Escar Smith, Dean of Libraries at the University of Tennessee, notes that “the University of Tennessee is already a national leader in providing open access to our institution’s scholarship. Trace, our online archive of research and creative works, gives UT’s scholarship wider visibility and greater impact. And the UT Libraries’ digital imprint, Newfound Press, publishes works that are unlikely candidates for market-driven presses because of their narrow focus or innovative format. By joining the LPC, we will continue to work with other leading academic libraries to find new ways to lower costs and overcome other barriers to disseminating the products of scholarship.”

The Educopia Institute serves and advances the well-being of libraries, information/research centers, and their parent institutions by fostering the advancement of shared information systems and infrastructures. Educopia acts as a catalyst to assist and advise libraries and other closely affiliated cultural memory institutions in the creation of new digital means of preserving and providing access to scholarly communication and the cultural record in socially responsible ways.